Some of you may remember a few weeks ago I installed Debian on my mini cube system.

I got bored and decided to try a new release PCLOS. http://www.pclinuxonline.com/pclos/

This is based on Mandrake and is billed as the most complete windows replacement going.

Installation is incredibly easy, pop in the bootable cd and let it run. Click the desktop shortcut for installation and select the partitioning options that you require.

Next find yourself something to do for a few minutes. From clicking go to having an installed system took 20mins. This is on a duron 1800 with and old slow maxtor hard drive and half a gig of memory, the equivalent windows xp install takes over 40 minutes on this system.

The system installs KDE as the default desktop manager which is perfectly useable and non scary. Setting up the network took me a few minutes and a little bit of head banging until i looked at the config menus properly and got it all going.

The list of installed applications is staggering, openoffice, firefox, thunderbird, several media players and hundreds of others including several games which put the windows collection to shame.

in all honesty a total beginner could install and start using this in about half an hour.

Brilliant.